The Big Fix

Wilson Perumal belonged to the third-largest ethnic group in Singapore. There was no such thing as a Singaporean. There was Chinese, Malay, Sinhalese, Filipino, Thai, each with a different language, each adopting English as default dialect, each keeping secrets in their particular tongues. Singapore was a place of secondary identities, a place of no insiders. Perumal skimmed from one social set to another, between ethnic groups, learning to conceal his motivation in order to persuade and gain advantage. He could have made an effective salesman if he hadn’t gravitated to kids who likewise couldn’t conceive of their futures, just what they could get their hands on right now. Perumal tried his hand at petty crime. With a few friends, he stole a VCR from the Teck Whye School. They sold it, pulling in five hundred Singapore dollars. They took a cab downtown, saw a few movies, blew the money on popcorn and beer, incautious about what they had done.

Later, a member of his crew stole a pair of football cleats, and this led to the group’s undoing. Confronted by the authorities, the friend told the whole story, about the shoes, the VCR, and other thefts, implicating Perumal in so doing. The next day, a headline in the local paper read: “Asian School Athlete Charged with House Breaking.” It was the sort of teenage troublemaking that often scares an adolescent onto the right path in life. In Perumal, the episode simply provided his first publicity. There would be much more.

Perumal was now acquainted with criminality, yet this was hardly the most serious offense in Singapore. The country had become a disciplined, transparent economic model for the world, yet illegal betting remained the most tolerated crime there was, a clandestine element of the culture. There was little the strict government could do about it. Everyone gambled. Just as Perumal did, at Jalan Besar Stadium.

When Perumal realized that the Chinese men had taken advantage of him, he turned his attention to the players who sprinted and struggled in the clinging Singapore humidity, less than one hundred miles north of the equator. Perumal knew what that was like, to work hard for little reward, growing up with nothing in your pockets, with few prospects to fill them, your restless energy leading in self-destructive directions. Perumal understood the point of developing a singular focus on something that might carry you out of poverty. Along the way toward on-field glory, he thought, what was wrong with making a little something on the side?

He related this reasoning to several of his friends who played football. Everyone saw eye to eye, common understanding being the essential element of manipulation. He purchased two sets of football jerseys. One red, one white. He rented a local stadium, paying a hundred dollars to monopolize the field for two hours. He listed the match in the local papers. He bought a pair of shorts, a polo shirt, and socks and shoes – all black – draping them on a friend. “You’re the referee,” Perumal told him.

When the Chinese bettors from Jalan Besar Stadium, always looking for action, read about the match in the newspaper, they showed up at the appropriate time and location. When the red team went up 2–0 at halftime, the old Chinese men were all too happy to bet on red to win the match, handing their markers to Perumal and smiling to themselves at the kid who didn’t understand hang cheng. When the white team had scored its third goal of the second half, the old Chinese men weren’t laughing anymore. They knew that the kid who was learning the ropes had just roped them into a scam.

Perumal had found his calling: easy money. His first fixed match was so successful that he carried it out in stadiums throughout Singapore. The losing bettors didn’t complain, even though they sensed something tricky about these wagers and these games. They couldn’t go to the cops. They couldn’t grouse and lose face. All they could do was pay Wilson Perumal what they owed him.

Perumal pursued this scheme into his twenties, and he developed a taste for things that he could never have before. It was the first time he had any money. Running through pool halls and chasing girls with his friends until the sun came up, he bet his earnings on matches in Europe’s biggest football leagues, the matches that were just starting to be televised in Singapore. As he watched the games, in that charged, early-morning condition of fatigue, youth, and stimulation, Perumal conceived of something bigger.

CHAPTER 3

With a mustache that runs long and tall and out of date, Chris Eaton calls to mind a frontier sheriff, the one man willing to establish justice on the range, where the sun catches his tin star, confirming the higher calling of order. “I quite would have liked that,” Eaton says. “There are a lot of people that need shooting on the edge of the corral.”

Eaton comes at you with the inevitable momentum of an arrest. However, his Australian informality requires you to remind yourself that he is an upholder of the law. Sixty-two years old, Eaton has the energy of a thirty-year-old. He has fathered six children, the youngest now just two years of age, confirming that he’s not slowing down. “Life is for living,” Eaton is fond of saying. “Not for rule-making.” His firm moral foundation, however, is a touchstone shallowly concealed, a lager in hand all that’s necessary to lead him sometimes to soliloquy.

The speech he gives these days invariably instructs the ill-informed, the morally lax, and the financially curious about the inner evils and workings of match-fixing. In European conference halls and Asian banquet rooms and the New York bar or two, Eaton arrives as featured speaker, the face and voice of the fight against “the manipulation of sporting events for the purpose of illegal betting.” He is an official carved perfectly to combat fixing. Eaton is dogged, antipolitical, rule-bound, perceptive of people, and not afraid of an audience, which he doesn’t coddle. “Chris talks to powerful people like they’ve never been spoken to,” says one of his lieutenants.

When Eaton leaves these powerful people – elected officials, police superintendents, administrators in the sporting world – they often shake their heads in derision. Match-fixing could never happen to us. Invariably, months or maybe a year or two later, when enough time has passed for Eaton to fade from their thoughts, suddenly he returns. What he predicted has come to pass. And he is the only one to call for help, because no one else knows what to do. This has happened so often as to defy coincidence. The billions of dollars available in the manipulation of football matches are too tempting for organized crime to ignore, and match-fixing creeps into every local market. Eaton spreads his gospel and combats his criminal opponents, his monthly itinerary a checkerboard of takeoffs and landings from one continent to another. A lifelong policeman, he has become football’s redeemer, the one man with the will and the strategy to scuttle match-fixing and restore the integrity of the game.

Eaton never wanted to be a cop. In his view, the police force was a destination of lowly ambition. In 1960s Australia, it was. Policing employed muscle, rather than cunning. It reflected not only the predominate domestic view, that the law cast no shades of gray, but also the country’s sporting culture. Australian rules football was the sport of choice, a game that developed a man’s ability to wear down his opponent in barely legislated brutality. Football, the thinking man’s game, a sport of deft artistry, was the province of European émigrés, awkward souls stranded Down Under who gathered now and again on the patchy turf of neglected fields, communicating in this foreign language of strategy.

It was Eaton’s older brother, Ian, the firstborn of the family, who wanted to wear blue. At eighteen years old, he was the right size, six foot two and 200 pounds, big and rangy enough to succeed with aggression in the Victoria Police, but he failed the police exam.

Life’s path navigated away from Ian’s control, while Chris was certain that he would draw his own. The family spent its Christmas vacations at Mornington, outside Melbourne, bunking together in a mobile home, where Chris would break out pencil and paper. He had inherited a talent for sketching from his father, an architect, who encouraged him toward the profession. But Chris was interested in the human form. While he sketched the outlines of a face or a torso, he felt a person take shape in his understanding – how a well-placed stroke could manipulate them to one position or another. He thought that he would attend art college in Melbourne.

Ian’s path carried him to the army, though it always meandered back to Mornington every summery December. Ian would pack into a car with two of his friends, headed for nearby Cape Schanck, where the nineteenth-century lighthouse brought in the tourists, while the girls in bikinis attracted their own local attention. One clear afternoon, the boys wandered along the cliffs that overlooked the beach, the waves elapsing along the rocks, and the sandy pathway crumbled underfoot. Ian fell the full seventy feet to the rocks, causing the brain hemorrhage that killed him.

Sixteen-year-old Chris watched his mother sink into depression. Regret consumed his father, a career man who had known his oldest son only passingly. Chris’s younger brother, Anthony, was neglected. Chris put away his pencils and drawings, and he abandoned school in favor of the police academy. This would be his way of memorializing Ian. He didn’t see himself as a cop, but by sacrificing himself so that his family might emotionally recover, he displayed the character of the ideal policeman – shielding the victims, even if he didn’t realize, in his youth, that he was a victim, too.

At Melbourne’s St. Kilda precinct, Eaton looked the part physically, like his brother big enough to handle himself. But the difference in temperament between his colleagues and himself was so striking that Eaton was certain he was in the wrong profession. By the 1970s, St. Kilda’s nineteenth-century seaside mansions had been sectioned into apartments for low-income families, and the neighborhood became a dim environment of drugs, violence, and prostitution. Crime was such a part of life in St. Kilda that police could apply no lasting solution to it. They could only identify “natural criminals,” night-sticking them into temporary submission. “We were really the thin blue line in those days,” Eaton says. “I learned quickly that policing was there to repress the troublesome in society from those who didn’t want to be troubled by them.”

This was no element for the righteous or the philosophical, or even the merciful. One afternoon, police detained an offender, who arrived at the St. Kilda precinct. The man had groped a girl on the beach, but by law Eaton had to let him free. There was not enough evidence. Eaton later learned that the man had gone on to rape and murder. And so while the roughhouse nature of St. Kilda policing offended Eaton’s cerebral disposition, experience broadened his view. “By taking no action, you exude weakness,” he says. “Criminals only respect authority. And authority doesn’t come from the uniform. It comes from a style.”

In a place beholden to gangs, the police were St. Kilda’s biggest gang of all. As Eaton looked through the bars of the precinct’s back window and out onto Port Phillip Bay, he realized that he hadn’t signed up to be part of a posse. Each night, he felt for a solution, as he transited from the charged environment of the St. Kilda streets to his wife, Debbie, back home.

Debbie was the slim, brown-haired girl next door, laughing and animated. She was also sixteen, and the two married in a shotgun wedding in 1972 when Chris was nineteen and a rookie in the Victoria police force. They named their son Ian. A daughter, Sarah, came along in 1976.

As if compensating for the education that he had relinquished, Eaton became a reader of great hunger and interest. In the pages of the books that he read in his young family’s two-bedroom apartment, he encountered mention of an organization that might serve as a model for his own. It was the FBI’s cerebral approach to crime prevention that agreed with the ideas Eaton was rapidly developing. He admired the work of J. Edgar Hoover, if not the man himself, and Hoover’s vigorous application of the law to the influential, whereas police had before applied it only to the impoverished. In Australia, Eaton saw a mirror image. “The people who were committing the big crime in Melbourne, the people with money, the people who were committing enormous frauds on society, police didn’t even pay a note’s attention to them,” he says. Eaton understood that the crime that was visible on the streets of St. Kilda was the result of greater forces, grand manipulators hidden from view. He realized that it wasn’t enough to cultivate authority, but to apply it to effect.

Eaton wrote about his progressive ideals in the police journals. This gained him notice and promotion into the Australian federal police, working in Canberra, the Australian capital. Not yet thirty years old, Eaton had achieved all of the things that his brother Ian had hoped he would in a lifetime.

He was enjoying a cool respite in 1981 as he steered his Ford Fairmont north along the M31 highway, on his way home from Melbourne, where he had just served as best man at the wedding of his brother Anthony. The kids were asleep in the backseat. Debbie was slouched against a pillow in the passenger seat, her eyes closed. The fog in the air wisped in spirals around the rushing frame of the Fairmont coupe. It wasn’t a long trip from Melbourne to Canberra – five hours if you drove like you meant it – and Eaton was taking it slow. There was no rush. He steered along the highway’s winding curve, enjoying the way that felt, to be in control. Headlights roused him from his thoughts.

CHAPTER 4

KUALA LUMPUR, 1990

Rajendran Kurusamy would stride into the raucous stadia of the Malaysia Cup like he was the tournament commissioner. In many ways, he was – controlling which players saw the field, determining winners and losers, paying referees and coaches from an ever-renewing slush fund. The Malaysia Cup was a competition between teams representing Malaysian states, along with the national teams of Singapore and Brunei. It was the early 1990s. Talking on his clunky, early-model mobile phone, Kurusamy would attend a game long enough for the players on the field to notice that he was there, remembering the money they had taken from him, understanding that the fix was on. Kurusamy would leave the match as forty-five thousand fans celebrated a goal, unaware of the man who had set it up. Those who knew him called him Pal. Those who made money with him called him the Boss. Those who owed him money often didn’t have the opportunity to call him anything at all, Kurusamy’s muscle engaging in one-sided conversations. Kurusamy was the king fixer in the golden age of the pre-Internet racket.

As Kurusamy walked out of Stadium Merdeka, with its view of the Kuala Lumpur skyline, Wilson Perumal was just walking in. The Petronas Towers were elevating into the sky, soon to be the world’s tallest buildings. Perumal was also rising in the estimation of those around him. His Chinese contacts from the small-time Singapore action respected him for the lumps he had given them. They pulled him along to the livelier action of the Malaysia Cup.

The betting was heavier than anything Perumal had ever seen. Men who displayed no outward signs of wealth would bet $100,000 on a game, and more. It was a frenzy, the action conducted through a web of runners and agents who transferred bets to unseen bookies. Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai, Vietnamese. You called and placed bets over the phone. You had to build up a reputation before a bookie would take your bet, but it all happened quickly, as long as you paid your losses. No one knew who sat at the top, who pulled the strings, just that the bets escalated higher and higher, and if you delayed in paying a debt, it wouldn’t be long before someone paid you a visit. This was the action that Perumal had been looking for, and he fell to it naturally, any thought of a conventional life left behind. “If I go to work for thirty days, I earn fifteen hundred dollars,” he said to himself. “But here, I am gambling fifteen hundred per game. It doesn’t tally.” His wins got bigger, but his losses did, too. The point was that his money was in motion, which was a trait of a high roller, the only person Perumal wanted to become. He looked around, and he realized as the games played out on the field that there were no fans, just bettors. The match was a casino. The players were the dice or the cards, which could be loaded or marked by the manipulators who gravitate to apparent games of chance.

The games of the Malaysia Cup were not games of chance, or so the chatter led Perumal to believe. In the stands or on the phone or on the street, he would hear of the fix. Few people knew for sure. But everybody could tell. Perumal watched the ripple cascade through the ranks of the bettors, and he recognized the real game and who possessed the power in it. He learned to take advantage of the hints he heard, throwing his money in the direction of the fix. As he collected his winnings, he heard the name Pal. If you could get close to Pal, people said, you would know which way the wind was blowing. You could get rich.

Back in Singapore, Perumal continued his own small operations, publicly listing games between his friends, manipulating the outcomes, running the betting, making a few thousand here and there. But he was searching for bigger game, having gotten a taste for it, higher stakes, greater liquidity in the market. He searched for any usable angle. Bookies would take bets on anything, even friendly matches between company teams. Perumal fixed games between employees of hotels or nightclubs or corporations, graduating a level. These were existing teams, however amateur and marginal. They weren’t clubs that he had arranged from thin air. He couldn’t control every aspect of the match, as before. He had to concentrate his efforts. He realized that every player didn’t need to be in on the fix, just the goalie and the central defenders. He could even get by with just the goalie, if he had to, as long as the goalie reliably allowed the other team to score. Perumal learned that paying the attacking players, or even the midfielders, was throwing away his money. He paid the players to lose, not to score, not to win. As he looked around the field, Perumal watched the odd fan engaged in the action from afar, believing it to be real. The scale did not compare, though the feeling was the same. Perumal experienced the stimulation that Kurusamy must also feel. It was the power to deceive.

Perumal’s profits rolled in, but they rolled right back out. The money he earned on his fixes couldn’t back the kinds of bets he had to make in order to be taken seriously in the Malaysia Cup. When you bet big and you bet often, as Perumal did, you’re bound to lose big, especially when you’re not in on the fix. Perumal found himself in the hole for $45,000. He didn’t know who held the marker. He had placed the bet through a friend. The friend had “thrown” the bet to a runner, who had thrown it to an agent, at which point the bet had mingled with the thousands of other bets that made the circuit appear tangled and confused. It wasn’t confusing to everybody. One person could see through the confusion.

They said that Pal Kurusamy controlled ten of the fourteen teams in the Malaysia Cup, directing the clubs and circulating the players. Himself, he moved around in a big Mercedes. Pal was tough, unrefined, the richest guy in the game, known to bet millions of dollars on a single match. He didn’t mind letting people know that he had made more than $17 million from match-fixing, and this in only five months. Police and politicians depended on his payouts. Criminal groups acknowledged the necessity of his network. For a time, Kurusamy was one of the most powerful people in Malaysia.

Kurusamy punched Perumal in the midsection. “Pay up your bet,” he yelled at him. Several of Kurusamy’s enforcers had approached Perumal at a local stadium. They brought him to the Boss’s place near Yishun Park, in Singapore’s Sembawang district. It didn’t take long for Perumal to understand that his $45,000 bet had gone all the way up to the Boss. Kurusamy punched him again. Kurusamy was a small man, but Perumal knew better than to fight back.

Kurusamy also knew better than to push too hard, because he was always on the lookout for an edge. He knew that Perumal was fixing. It was his job to know. And a man who was fixing, at any level, might someday become useful.

Perumal wasn’t sure what to do. He was prone to looking for an exit route, rather than a solution. But he kept in mind the story of Tan Seet Eng, a Chinese-Singaporean horse-racing bookmaker. Eng, who went by the name Dan Tan, was associated with Kurusamy. Yet even he was forced to flee Singapore when he couldn’t cover a large football bet, hiding out in Thailand until he could negotiate a payment plan. This was a common story in the world of Singapore’s bookies and betting, one that Perumal wanted to avoid. If you were out of Singapore, you were out of the action.

Perumal eventually settled his bet. That was enough for Kurusamy to invite him to his regular poker game. Perumal could hardly keep up, the stakes were so high. Money meant everything to Kurusamy and his circle, although it was clear to Perumal from the action at the poker table that money for them held no value. So much cash was pouring in from Kurusamy’s fixing enterprise that he barely had time to account for it. Perumal would sit at Kurusamy’s side and watch captivated while the Boss handed out stacks of hundred-dollar bills without counting them, as players, refs, and club officials from Malaysia and Singapore paraded through his office as though he was their paymaster.

Perumal watched and learned how fixing was done at the highest level. How to approach a player in false friendship. The way to pay him far greater than the competition, in order to poach him. How to use women to trap players. How to develop a player, then pull strings to get him transferred to a club under your control. How to threaten someone else in the player’s presence, so that he would get the message without feeling in danger himself. How to take a player shopping, buy him some clothes, some shoes, make him feel special, as you would do for your girlfriend. How to follow through on a threat if a player resisted your demands.

Perumal also saw that even a figure as important as Kurusamy still had to bow to the Chinese in gambling circles. The Chinese ultimately held every big ticket. Not only did China have the largest mass of people the world, as well as a rising economy, but it also had the strongest organized crime network in Asia, the Triads. All down the line in the bookmaking business, Chinese controlled everything of worth and importance.

Kurusamy was undeniable, but he was not the only one. Perumal watched teams staying in the same hotel get friendly with one another. Club officials had drinks together in the lounge. One team needed a win to advance in the tournament. The other team had already gained the next round. Money exchanged hands. Or sometimes just the promise of a return favor. It was easy. No victims. It was just the way things were done in Asian football. To Perumal, it appeared that everybody was in on the fix, and that nobody was trying to stop it.

He watched players inexplicably miss the net on penalty kicks, and he knew why. The talk was in the market, and if you listened to the talk, you could make some real money. But the money was fleeting. It came and went. Whatever he made fixing, he ended up betting on English Premier League matches, on UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) Champions League matches. Sometimes he won, but usually he lost, because he never knew how those games would turn out. Sometimes he had just enough money to ride the bus down to the stadium, which had become the only place where he hoped to make a few dollars.